A Whistling Woman (11 page)

Anyway, this preamble is my excuse for telling you I've spent time recently poking about in the case history of the man I told you about, Josh Lamb. He's had a bit of a relapse. Started seeing things and hearing voices again. Talked away furiously for 3 days to what sounded like a whole jury of inquisitors. I wish I didn't have my job to do. I'm sure there's some sort of sense, if one had time to listen, mixed up in all this stuff about light and dark, smudges and stains, aeons and twins, teeth and claws he goes on and on about. We had to put him in solitary. He wasn't sleeping and neither was anyone else. You'd need to listen
for days
to sort out the sense, the scenario. A lot of it's static, just babble. Well, I say that. How do I know?

Anyway, he calmed down. I am commanded to be still, he said. So I took a bit of a risk, and invited him back into the therapy group. The group seems to do him good, steady him.

We had a new member, a woman in her thirties, who's with us since a violent bust-up with her husband (who's in hospital). She's a quiet—indeed, totally silent—sensible-looking sort of person. Stabbed her husband with a stainless-steel trowel. He was in the habit of beating her up, that's known. She has three kids, all of whom were injured in the final set-to. One, the youngest, looked likely to lose an eye, it was
bad
. They're in care, now. The husband claims his wife made an unprovoked attack on him and the children with a rake. He says she just went berserk. The problem for the police is that one of the two elder kids supports that story, and the other says, equally positively, that the father hit the mother with the rake, and she then grabbed it. Same with their injuries. One says dad did it, one says mum. Lucy doesn't speak at all. Hasn't opened her mouth since the incident. At all. She's quite docile. She's been charged with causing “actual bodily harm,” and placed in Cedar Mount until the trial. She agreed to come to the group—at least, she went where she was led. One of the other women—an irascible type—tried to provoke her into speaking. Accused her of not pulling her weight etc., etc.—just trying to look superior and make a nasty atmosphere. Lucy just sat. I wd say she didn't know where she was. The irascible woman (her name's Mira), appealed to Lamb—as they do—saying, didn't he agree, it wd only work if they all made some effort to speak. He said—as near as I can remember—I daren't write down what they say, at the time, in case I get taken for the Leader or the Recording Angel of the group—he said

“You can be in another world where there's too much space and too much meaning to speak. You hear wicked winds blast, you smell snow, you see blood, ordinary speech is like scales of dead skin falling from your scalp at your feet. She can only hear your complaining like dead leaves rustling. What you say may have force here, but not where she is. You should listen to her silence.”

And Mira said, I'm sorry, which was a first time.

And Lucy looked at him with tears in her eyes, and opened her mouth, and licked her lips, but no sound came out.

And he said to Lucy

“What you need to know, is that the good and the evil in the world are equal. You need to know that evil is not subordinate. It is a power, it can overcome. You need to know that you are not evil in yourself, but you are a battlefield, where it can fight and overcome.”

Or some such thing. It looks a bit flat, written down, what he said. But the atmosphere was electric. Lucy's tears ran. My own eyes prickled (I record this clinically). The word for the effect he has on the group is “charisma.” I'm beginning to think I'd like to write a paper on charisma. You have it, of course.

I don't, I think. I know.

Anyway, Elvet, I have as I said been doing some research into his history. And found nuggets of sheer gold. He let fall once that he'd been treated by Sam Krabbe, at Newcastle. So I got hold of old Krabbe's case-histories—with lots of trouble, I'll spare you the details. And I finally located him, because of old Krabbe's meticulous cross-referencing.

He was born, not Josh Lamb, but Joshua Ramsden. Born in Darlington, 1928. His father was an elementary school teacher and a Methodist lay preacher. Joseph Ramsden. Joseph Ramsden was hanged in Durham gaol in 1939 (May) for the murder of his wife, Nellie, and his daughter, Ruth, aged six. Krabbe's notes say he claimed to have seen an angel, who told him to smother his family, that they might not see the coming holocaust. He appears (Krabbe's notes are exiguous) to have compared himself to Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and to Jephthah, sacrificing his daughter. He refused to plead insanity. These are the bare bones—Krabbe gives no more details, though I guess I might find more, if I went through the archives of the local papers. Krabbe gives no indication, in the notes I have, of what Joseph Ramsden was like, or what, if anything, Joshua said about him.

During the war, Krabbe says Joshua says, he was “evacuated” to live with an “auntie,” called Agnes Lamb. (Is anyone? Is it not overdetermined?) National Service as an airman, invalided out with some illness that left him hospitalised for about two years—records not clear. He started a theology degree in Durham in the 1950s, again giving up because he was ill. Krabbe says he thinks he still feels called to the priesthood. He reads, as I think I told you, St. Augustine and Kierkegaard. He says he has always been a “wanderer” (tramp) and chooses to live in poverty. I don't know whether or not to tell him I've found out all these things he has resolutely refused to tell me.

The thing is, Elvet, the thing is,
imagine that man's life
. You can't. One day there is a family. (Maybe a perfectly ordinary-seeming one, maybe not, we don't know.) The next, there isn't. Mother and sister horribly dead. Dad in prison. Young Joshua possibly
intended to be dead
—or possibly not. Krabbe doesn't say how he escaped, or indeed how much he knew, or didn't, of what had happened. Then, after the long-drawn-out process of justice, Dad is dead too, even more horribly dead. I don't know what he knew of that, what he was told, what he guessed. In my experience you can't keep that sort of thing wholly secret, it seeps through. What did he think? Who did he think he was? How—you have to ask, in our profession—did he survive, even as disturbed and strange as he is?

I have to say, he is one of the kindest and gentlest men I have ever met. He has—in the midst of his whirlwind, a comprehensible explicable whirlwind—what seems to be a real wisdom. I do not know how to proceed, but if ever there was a man I wished to help, to cure, to enable, it is him. Which brings me back to where I began. We don't treat all our patients as equal. This one is slightly phosphorescent.

All this explains, of course, his interest in the fate of Lucy Nighby and her domestic mayhem. Her arrival coincided with his return to exhibiting deluded and hallucinated behaviour. It would, wouldn't it? If he knew her story (which was in the papers) and it seeped into his mind.

Maybe—just maybe—both he and she could benefit from yr Quakerish therapeutic community. How is it all going?

Chapter 6

A rash of stickers and posters appeared on the surfaces of the campus. They varied in size and design, in colour and style. There were small, square, white printed ones, usually verbose.

An intellectual minority remains totally inefficacious if it submits to,
or even becomes complacent in, the ghetto prepared for it.

Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the
exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation
between people. V. I. Lenin.

Mao-Tse-Tung-thought, like all true theory, claims to be true before
it has been realised, and to be realisable, because it is true.

These, and others like them, were characterised in very small print as “A preliminary pre-publication of the Anti-University of the Moors.” They were arranged in well-glued patterns on doors, pillars, blackboards, notice-boards, like hop-scotch grids, crosses of Lorraine or schemata for tic-tac-toe. There were also long plastic streamers, in dayglo pink, lime green, banana yellow, attached to window-frames, the branches of trees, goal-posts, rubbish-bins.

Be intolerant of repressive tolerance.

Syllabus is oppression. Get out from under the juggernaut.

Students are the new proletariat.

Teaching is exploitation.

Do not submit to e-ducation. You need not be led by the nose. Sit still,
stare around, expand your mind.

Then there were the art-works, painted on sheets and draped over lecterns, painted with gaudy flowers, naked humans, exploding volcanos.

Pop pills. Stop all ills.

All you need is your navel.

Freedom lies in the right use of the arsehole.

Try not to think.

Art is orgasm.

Knowledge is an illusion people have.

Come into gone. I do assure you. The dreadful has already
happened.

Heaps of leaflets blew between the towers.

The Anti-University is coming. Anti-knowledge, anti-ignorance,
anti-teaching, anti-students, anti-knickers, anti-Christ, anti-Buddha, anti-spinach, anti-bourgeois, anti-art, anti-anti-art, anti-transport, anti-plastics, anti-meat, anti-psychiatry, anti-Wijnnobel,
anti-phlogistin, anti-tealeaves, anti-capitalism, anti-hamburgers,
anti-fizzy-beer, anti-overweight-currencies-in-your-pocket, anti-white-or-any-other heat of technology, anti-being-anti. (Naturally.)

Wijnnobel and Hodgkiss met to discuss these manifestations. There was a touch of frost in the autumn air, and the lawn outside the Vice-Chancellor's window was crisped with it. He poured coffee from a Bauhaus silver pot for Hodgkiss, to whom he was attached, because they were both reasonable, reticent men. He liked the shape of the movement of the streamlined pot, and the curve of coffee, in front of his uncompromising Mondrian. These were the minimal refinements of a complicated civilisation.

“Where do you think all this is coming from, Vincent?”

“I don't know. I haven't heard of this Anti-University having any physical location. I don't know who runs it, or will run it.”

“You don't have an intelligence service.”

“I don't. I don't believe it's coming from the Student Union. We have a meeting with Nick Tewfell later this morning. He hasn't mentioned it.”

“Curious how put out I find myself to be singled out, by name, for attack.”

“Not precisely
singled
. You are lined up with Christ and Buddha.”

“And spinach. There's probably no harm in it.”

The North Yorkshire University had been relatively untouched by the first wave of student revolt. Wijnnobel and Hodgkiss had taken the unusual view that there was much to be said for the student demands for representation on governing bodies, and had accordingly invited Nick Tewfell, the Union President, and one other student-elected member, on to the Governing Body. They did not always make an appearance at meetings.

Hodgkiss said “If it's coming from outside, of course, it could escalate into something else.”

“I think we should do nothing to provoke that. I would even suggest leaving the stickers in place. Then they will have to stick over their own messages. No laws are being broken. Universities should defend liberties.”

“Pop pills?”

“It doesn't say which pills, does it?”

“It doesn't mean iron jelloids.”

“Some of it,” said Wijnnobel peacefully, pouring more coffee, “is quite funny.”

He turned to the subject of the Body-Mind Conference now scheduled for midsummer 1969, at the end of the academic year which was just beginning.

“I have letters, I am happy to say, from both Eichenbaum and Pinsky, accepting our invitation. Eichenbaum's provisional title is ‘The Idea of the Innate and Its Part in a Theory of Learning.' Pinsky says his will be something like ‘Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Psychology. Order from Noise.' ”

“Students have been known to object to both of them.”

“Indeed?”

“Eichenbaum was pelted with eggs and rotten fruit in America. And Pinsky was howled down with loudspeakers in Paris.”

“A university must uphold free speech. It is dangerous to prevent anyone from being heard,
anyone
. Which is why we must let this Anti-University have its say. Until and unless our own students are not following our own courses, and therefore failing.”

“I agree. We may turn out to be complacent.”

“Better than being provocative.”

“I agree. We agree. We might, most delicately and unobtrusively, sound out Nick Tewfell on both these issues.”

Wijnnobel poured more coffee.

“You will give a paper yourself, Vincent?”

“Would a paper on ‘Wittgenstein and the Dangerous Charm of Mathematics' be acceptable? It would connect logic, language, Cantor's ideas on infinity, Wittgenstein on Freud ...”

“I shall look forward to it. Now, let us look at what we should bring up with young Tewfell.”
Nick Tewfell was a neat, dark man, who wore a corduroy jacket, a checked shirt, and a red tie. His hair was cut short, clipped up the back of his narrow head. His preoccupations appeared to be more to do with canteen and bar improvements, than with the flamboyant slogans of the Anti-University. His father was an official in the Boilermakers' Union; he came from Sunderland. He was studying History—he was not an outstanding student, it had simply been his best subject at school—and spent much of his spare time working for the Calverley Labour party, and addressing the Calverley Young Socialists. He was, for a student politician, a pragmatic and accommodating man.

He sat in Wijnnobel's study and discussed forthcoming speakers, at the Union (Michael Foot, R. D. Laing), at the University (Anthony Crosland, Ernst Gombrich). The subject of the Body-Mind Conference arose. Wijnnobel, in a neutral voice, named the principal speakers. He said that the Conference would put the University firmly on the map, as an important centre of learning. Tewfell expressed polite enthusiasm for this idea, and volunteered that both Eichenbaum and Pinsky should attract a large audience. Hodgkiss smiled to himself. He asked Tewfell if he knew anything about the so-called Anti-University.

“I know where it is, I think. I know one or two of the people involved.”

“Students of the University?”

“Some. Not all. Some are graduate students.”

“Do you know anything about their proposed activities?”

“I don't know that
they
do, really. I don't think any of us have been approached—beyond the posters and things. I've not seen signs of any actual
classes
. Just notices.”

“I see no harm in notices. But I would naturally feel differently if classes were disrupted.”

“I'm sure you will be told of further developments. If there are any. We believe in free speech.”

“So does the University.”

Tewfell reported the concerns of the last Union Committee meeting.

“Students are asking for syllabus changes. They feel we have to do more work—spread ourselves wider—than students in other places.”

“You have one more year to do it. You chose to follow this syllabus. It is meant to be taxing.”

An edge of iron came into Gerard Wijnnobel's clear voice.

“Students are specifically asking if the requirement to study another language could be made optional.”

“Indeed. Why?”

“Because—because it is very hard, for some of them. And they want time to study important new things. Theories. Literary theory, political theory.”

“I have always said, no man understands his own language who cannot follow the forms of another language.”

“I should answer that,” said Tewfell, “by saying that no student can do
everything
in a first degree.”

“And I should have to accept that. But I believe certain things are essential to understanding the mind, and others come subsequently. I would argue that literary theory is meaningless without knowledge of more than one grammar and more than one syntax.”

“Grammar is élitism; grammar is a control system.”

“Nonsense.”

“I was quoting one of those posters, Vice-Chancellor.”

“How can grammar be élitist? You are confusing it with Received Pronunciation.”

“Not me. The posters.”

Hodgkiss said “It may become necessary to
explain
the language requirement to the student body.”

“It should—to the student mind, or any mind—be self-evident, beautiful, and clear,” said Wijnnobel.

“You are a perfectionist,” said Hodgkiss.

“A
practical
perfectionist,” said the Vice-Chancellor.

“It might be practical to put the case. With which I agree, entirely.”

“English Lit. students, particularly,” said Tewfell, “resent the time spent on languages. They say it's like going back to school.”

“As we all should, all our lives.”

“And,” said Hodgkiss pacifically, “they cannot say languages—living ones at least—have no use in the real world.”

“I didn't say I agreed with them,” said Tewfell. “I see what you mean. I report what they say. A significant body of opinion. I was mandated to say so.”

“I am disappointed,” said the Vice-Chancellor.

What had begun well had dampened down.
The Anti-University did in fact have a base. This was two caravans and a dormobile, parked at a place oddly known as Griffin Street. Griffin Street was an almost derelict row of labourers' cottages at the edge of the original Long Royston Estate, where parkland met open moors. The University proposed, when funds became available, to make the renovated cottages into graduate accommodation. One was already inhabited by two graduate students, Greg Tod and Waltraut Ross, a political historian and an anthropologist.

The dormobile belonged to Avram Snitkin, an itinerant ethnomethodologist. Snitkin had told Tod and Ross that he was writing up an in-depth study of law-court procedures in Britain, which he was. Tod and Ross suspected him of studying themselves at the same time. This didn't bother them. Ethno-methodology meant studying the world of the studied from inside that world, as it comported itself. They thought he had a right.

One of the caravans was horsedrawn, a real Romany caravan with shafts and high steps and curtained windows. This was inhabited by Deborah Ritter, who was not a student of UNY, or indeed of anywhere, though she had from time to time and place to place studied comparative religion, anthropology, folklore and psychology. The other caravan had once been white, and was oval-shaped like an egg, balanced on an axle and a strut. It was pulled by a landrover. The landrover belonged to Jonty Surtees, who was older than the others, and had been on Haight-Ashbery, and with the Nanterre students, and had visited the communes in Copenhagen, and liaised with Kommune I in Berlin. The caravans were just beyond the old park fence. They were not technically on University land. Deborah's horse, Vivasvat, fat, placid, dapple-grey with hairy fetlocks and an unkempt mane, grazed on a long tether. Deborah and Jonty Surtees were a kind of couple, both large and smiling, both with flowing red-gold hair over their shoulders. Surtees also had a fine red-gold moustache. He wore dark shirts, embroidered with flames and roses, open to the navel. Deborah wore Indian silky tunics over long skirts and bare feet; her brow was bound with a multi-coloured woven ribbon. Tod and Ross wore jeans and tee shirts, with varying slogans and faces. The Anti-University was taking shape in the five unused cottages in Griffin Street. Desks had been made from bricks and breeze-board. Typewriters clacked. In the kitchen Deborah cooked great cauldrons of beans, rice, herbs and floating curls of tomato skin. There was also a perpetual porridge-pot.
In curious synchrony with the Vice-Chancellor's invitations to Body and Mind, and at this stage unaware of the synchrony, the nuclear Anti-University despatched invitations to potential teachers and students. Greg Tod wrote to disaffected idealists from the LSE and Essex, Waltraut Ross wrote to student leaders in Europe, and Deborah Ritter wrote to various communes, hospitals, art schools and groups. Bring your own food and bedding, they said. We shall make a free space for self-expression, for the breakdown of artificial limits. Whilst they waited, they painted the caravans. The walls of the Romany caravan became a forest of silver and pine-green trees, overlapping, hung with gold and silver fruits and crimson pomegranates. The egg-shaped caravan was bedizened with coiling streamers and funnels and snakes and ladders and vines and creepers, inch by inch, in orange and shocking pink and pretty blues and many different greens. They argued for a whole evening about whether it was right to suggest topics of possible courses to potential instructors, and decided it was not. If by any chance everyone chose to give the same course, that only proved it was truly needed, and truly inspired. Leaflets were printed, saying, come and share your knowledge, however profound, however elementary. All can be studied, from cosmology to marmalade, from so-called madness to vegetarian cookery, from mantras to armed resistance to the death of capitalism to growing sweet-peas. The world is multifarious, so is the Anti-University. We can elucidate Karl Marx, set you on the way to Mao-thought, read your palm or open the secrets of the Tarot. All human life is here, or if it is not, it will be. Bring yourself (& food & bedding & music & art).
Late one afternoon, Ross, Tod and Deborah Ritter were sitting in the kitchen, smoking, burning incense, chopping onions, and discussing the withering of the bourgeois state and the transfiguration of the proletariat. Deborah was humming, which annoyed Greg Tod, who was talking. A figure appeared between the trees in the parkland, coming from the direction of the university. It was a black figure, female, heavy, tall; its progress was urgent and ungainly. Waltraut Ross watched out of the kitchen window, as the woman approached. Ross herself was small and skinny, and dressed usually in tight black sweaters and leggings like a resting ballerina. She had the very thin woman's contempt for the buxom or the heavy.